Same old same old

This week offered the "beauty" issue of T, an NYT glossy. Typically I don't even bother reading T because it's geared toward people way above my pay grade, and although I'm a masochist, expensive pretty things don't register nearly high enough on my bar of Things to Justify Self-Torture. But the magazine did feature on its cover a picture of Evan Rachel Wood ("Thirteen," "Pretty Persuasion") looking ethereal in rainbow-bright blush and eye shadow, and because I'm a fan, I picked up the magazine to see if it had anything interesting to say about her (aside from the usual "mature for her age," "not the typical teen actress," "always aspired to be Jodie Foster"). Answer: not really.

But in flipping through the pages, something else caught my eye: this article and photo spread on handsome aging actors. "Love Among the Ruins," the headline said, and the subhed: "Their dissolute faces hold out the possibility of an inner life. And what could be sexier than that?"

At which point the steam started rising ... to my ears.

Do I object to the substance of the words? No. Do I agree that these are all wrinkledly appealing individuals? Sure, most of them. Jeremy Irons: hot. Sam Shepard: totally. Ed Harris: hubba hubba. These are men whose organic marks of age, divine talent and smoldering eyes combine to distinguish them from mere over-the-hill pretty boys, the sum of their parts making the heart beat a little faster and the knees go a little wobbly. Catch me. I swoon.

But I did have to sigh dejectedly at the presence of this spread without what would have been a refreshing, even daring, counterpart: a photo essay extolling the sexiness and elegance of similarly mature women -- and without the digital erasing. It brought to mind one of the many dispiriting truisms to be found in The Beauty Myth, in a passage in which Naomi Wolf quotes a women's magazine editor, then weighs in herself:

"By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60-year-old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60-year-old readers look in the mirror and think they look too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine." ...

How do the values of the West, which hates censorship and believes in the free exchange of ideas, fit in here? This issue is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one's own future and to be proud of one's life. Airbrushing age off women's faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened. ... To airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history.

In a "beauty" issue packed with advertisements featuring near-naked, nubile young things -- not to mention a 19-year-old on the cover -- how amazing it would have been to open to a black-and-white pageant of timeworn yet alluring women divulging their "inner lives" through "dissolute faces." But thus is the nature of the culture. The men are depicted as having attained an intensity, an increased sexual vitality, with age, whereas the women -- well, they seem not to exist. In fact, the one woman to make an appearance in the finished product -- the essayist -- falls right into the usual role of background voice, in which she not only slathers on the adoration, but takes the audacious step of reminding us (female) readers of our "natural" position:

Even if you were raised by feminists and the men who divorced them, females are still hard-wired to be accommodating and supportive, the shadowy figure behind the throne.

Also:

We ladies may be self-determined and independent, but hormones are hormones, and hard-wiring can't be short-circuited by ambition, careerism or anything containing batteries. ... One night is all some women can stand; for the rest of us, though, the unwritten genetic imperative trumps celibacy, serial dating and spending holidays in bed with Netflix.

And:

There's something about a man carrying the world's ills on his back that makes us want to lie down on ours.

Uh ... barf?

What at first glance appeared to be an opportunity for us gals to get hot and bothered over some hunky pictures instead turned into a chance to remind us that our rightful place is in the shadow of the man; to warn us that we'd better not be tempted by ambition, lest we end up like one of those feminists destined for divorce court; and to tell us how silly it would be to try to deny the "hard-wiring" that tells us to settle down, make babies and spread our legs every time our world-weary guys give the spine-tingling signal.

I have nothing against the veneration of these accomplished men slipping into their august years. But I can't help but feel that here, a major opportunity was lost. And major insult was added to injury.

Comments

[aimee m.]

how sad it must be to be the shell of a woman that is S.S. Fair. to be so helpless, so dependent on a cock-sure puppeteer to come and make us dance. "hard-wired?" "unwritten genetic imperative?" we might as well lower the age of marital concent to 13, and ban women from schools--it's just a waste of time and money, if all we're to be is breeders.

sigh. i'd love to say this is shocking, too, but it's not. read any bridal magazine or, for that matter, any fluffy glossy it-girl mag. girls are giving up, and the rest of us are literally screwed because of it.

[Tami]

Hear, hear! Thanks for that. =)

[ss fair]

yeah, it would have been great to have done a spread on aging women--I wish that that sold magazines, or even editors. I wish someone would pay me to do that, believe me,I'd be all over it. I've wished since the bra burning days that reality was different for women, better, more about parity. I was as drunk on the possibilities as anyone. Still am..but guess what? There's a terrible backlash,in case you haven't noticed. I'm not the one wearing strings up my butt or impossible shoes or spending time and money getting hairless just to catch a man. I'm out there trying to make a living, supporting myself and a kid. So here's a piece of info from the real non-blog world: evolution moves glacially, painfully, slowly. Women ARE hard-wired, I didn't make that up, so why slag me for being the messenger? It doesn't mean you can't fight the anatomy is destiny fight.. but try selling that to the gender that still holds all the power and stop preaching to your dissaffected, embittered choir. Above all, I'm truly sorry about yr humor bypass. it should have occurred to you that "feminists and the men who divorce them" was as sarcastic and sardonic and flipping-the-bird-like as the NY Times ever gets. ss fair

[Jen]

dear ss,

first, let me say that this was meant to be more a criticism of the predictable decisions made by the magazine than it was of the piece itself. i, too, work for a living, even tangle in the same industry. i know how it works, how decisions get made, who is in charge -- all that lovely stuff. (assuming that all bloggers live only in some “blog world” is a bit too narrow a view to take these days, you know.)

and, as someone who knows a bit about anthropology and gender issues, let me also say: of course i know you didn’t make the “hard-wiring” thing up; credit for that goes back ages, and it has been used so frequently to explain women’s behavior as to have become a cliché. yes, abundant articles and studies and whatnot have argued that women are by nature inclined to nurture, to mate, to settle down, to breed. but women’s behavior in the 21st century is just as much as, if not more, of a product of the way they are raised and the messages they are given. and how are girls and women supposed to fight against the current backlash when their fellow girls and women continue to make excuses to justify their participating in the economy of subordination? we are all human creatures with real, non-blog-world responsibilities: jobs to do, bills to pay, loved ones to care for. but in the jobs we do -- especially if one is, say, a freelance writer -- we do have some power of choice and execution.

and so, as noted before, i’m all for writing glowingly about the men we lust after. it’s just disappointing that such an essay must include the subservient language. (maybe it was an attempt at sarcasm, but it wasn’t guaranteed to read that way to everyone.) if girls read an article telling them it’s in their nature to be subordinate, what are they supposed to think? even if they don’t take what’s written at face value -- and even if they can see the humor in it -- it’s still another hit, if oh-so-subtle, to their sense of place in the world, and to their self-worth.

with just a little tweak in spirit -- and without changing the message of the essay overall -- it could have been written from the position that men have been writing from for decades: ooh, look at those tasty men; i’m a powerful woman; i could have one of those.

that was the spirit in which i read the piece through the first three yummy paragraphs (and sure, i'll give you that: yummy they were). then, well -- i guess we know we’re of differing minds there. of course, it’s the writer’s prerogative to decide what to write. and your version, after all, was deemed fit to print. (paycheck earned, right?) but it’s also any reader’s prerogative, any woman’s prerogative -- blogger or non-blogger -- to analyze and criticize; that’s also the nature of the world we live in. i suppose you could lump the critics into the same camp of disaffected, embittered souls, pitiable victims of humor bypasses all. me, i'd say that's not much of an argument.

[Brendon]

I don't know why this argument is even happening. As the wizened head of Indy Car Racing is quoted (in reference to a female driver): "Women should wear white, like all household appliances."

now THAT'S sarcasm.